How Do You Find the Right Advertising Agency for You?
| Published date | 01 September 1981 |
| Date | 01 September 1981 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb057210 |
| Pages | 11-13 |
| Author | AdamMA KnowlesMIPAMInstM |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
How Do You Find the Right
Advertising Agency for You?
by Adam Knowles, MA, MIPA, MlnstM
Where can you find it?
How do you select it?
How do you make it work?
The last in our series of six articles covering
the major aspects of industrial advertising
and marketing
Advertising is rather like sex. When it's good it's bloody
marvellous, but even when it's bad, it seldom does you
any lasting harm. The right advertising plan or approach
may double your sales, the worst is unlikely to be seen.
Patently however, if you follow the maxim that advertis-
ing is an investment whose purpose is to do very much
better than merely pay for
itself,
you need to aim high.
Which is fair enough - what's the point in deliberately
planning to come second to your competition?
But finding and selecting the best source of supply is a
major problem whatever your product or market. The
rate of change among the major consumer accounts is
enough to indicate that stability is less usual than not.
For the industrial manufacturer the difficulties are grea-
ter. The time span from finished product to completed
sale is a long one. His markets are often highly tech-
nical, dispersed and difficult accurately to define. And
his budgets are (relative to consumer perishables) very
small. So there is a real danger that a change of agency
or advertising campaign may confuse and deter custom-
ers half-way through the purchasing decision cycle; and
there is also the danger that the "spend" may be too
small to attract the really talented agency team that you
need.
The right advertising plan or
approach may double your sales,
the worst is unlikely to be seen
One result of this problem is that many industrial
manufacturers take what the agency world calls "the
in-house route", i.e. they do it themselves. In theory
this ought to work entirely well. After all, if those
responsible for your advertising and marketing planning
are full-time executives selected, hired and paid exclu-
sively by you and only work for you surely you're more
likely to get precisely what's right, than appointing a
bunch of outsiders who know much less about the pro-
duct and its market than you do, and who are very
unlikely indeed to be remotely full-time working on your
behalf.
There are two quite important fallacies behind the
theory which become horribly evident, usually too late,
when it is put into practice. Firstly, the purpose and
contribution value of an advertising agency lies pre-
cisely in that fact that it doesn't know as much as you
do about your product or service. It doesn't spend all its
waking hours perfecting that particular polyethylene
widget that's going to make all the difference to custom-
ers,
cost or performance - it's spending the time that
you don't actually have, because you've better things to
do with your expertise and time, looking at competitive
activities, examining shifts in market demand, and most
of all analysing cheaper ways of presenting what you
want to sell to more people and in better ways more
often than the sales force could get round to in a month
of Sundays.
An advertising manager, at a not
very high salary, is going to cost,
with his overheads, £20,000 a year
(An ad in a trade journal has a chance of being seen
and read by anything up to 100,000 people who might
want to buy from you if only they knew you existed and
make what you do. Not only can the sales force not get
round to that many, but of course, half the time they
don't even know who or where they are.)
The other problem attached irrevocably to the "in-
house route" is that of sheer cost. One half-way compe-
tent advertising manager, including his necessary car,
rent, light, heat, telephone, and expenses and overheads
is going to knock at least £20,000 off the figure at the
bottom right-hand corner of your balance sheet (and
that's not a very high salary you're paying him either!)
Add an artist and a writer and you can virtually treble
the figure we started with.
Whereas with an advertising agency you simply pay
for what you get; it's the agency management's problem
to make sure that their total time is profitably used, not
yours.
And, of course, you get experts on marketing,
media, PR, research, graphics and anything else you
need, for just as long as they're making a contribution to
your business in a way that hiring yourself would make
impossible. The good advertising people run their own
business, not someone else's and that's where you'll
find them.
Which is all very well, but how do you find them?
Advertising has become a very highly specialised
industry in its own right. As a result the layman is less
and less able or qualified to tell a good one from a poor
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1981 11
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